Some Samples of Yankee Shrewdness, by Joseph C. Lincoln. Article in AMERICAN MAGAZINE, July, 1919.
My Types: An Interview with Joseph C. Lincoln, by Charles Francis Reed, THE FORUM MAGAZINE, February, 1919.
Cape Cod’s Genial Chronicler: An Appreciation by Hamlin Garland. PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY, 17 April, 1920.
The Men Who Make Our Novels, by George Gordon. MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY, 1919.
Joseph Crosby Lincoln, by Adam C. Haeselbarth. BOOK NEWS MONTHLY, 1913.
20. Edith Wharton and the Time Spirit
i
AT just past sixty Edith Wharton’s is still a name for the literary conjuror in search of an impressive effect. She has lived a long time—in the literary sense—and comparisons are not easy; she has outlived, as a writer, most comparisons, including the one which would probably have been fatal to anyone else, the comparison with Henry James. She has outlived, in the physical sense, Henry James himself; there are no more of his frequent letters to “Dear Edith.” It is among the subtler tributes to Mrs. Wharton, the person, that the intellectual relation between her and the man who was once called her “Master” is now seen in a light which considerably enhances the dignity of the woman who was once called “Pupil.” For who, after reading the correspondence of Henry James, published since his death, believes any longer that Mrs. Wharton ever owed anything to that man’s patronage so nicely tinctured with snobbery? Victor Hugo permitted himself to be surrounded by those who worshipped him as a god, but Hugo posed, godlike; whereas Henry James——
Mrs. Atherton is several years older than Edith Wharton, both as person and author; Mary Johnston, born eight years later, is of almost exactly the same literary age; but the first is a superb journalist and a born storyteller and the second is a mystic and a historian. Mrs. Wharton’s journalism in fiction is pretty well confined to The House of Mirth and The Fruit of the Tree; she invites comparison with Mary Johnston only in that ambitious novel of mediæval Italy, The Valley of Decision. In the two books on which Mrs. Wharton’s fame definitely rests at the present, Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence, she achieves a success and an individuality only the more interesting because it finds so strikingly different expressions.
In fact, on the evidence of the two stories, it would be superficially impossible to assert that the “sterile” tragedy of New England hillsides was from the same hand that wrote the minutely detailed story of New York society in the 1870s. Considered for their meaning and origin, Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence are both seen to be tales of frustration, both tales of the America that Mrs. Wharton quitted some fifteen years ago but can’t get out of her system, and both stories in which the background is responsible for the actors themselves as well as the play.